For those of you using nofollow tags on your site to control PageRank and the flow of link juice, Matt Cutts of Google has written a very short article explaining why Google doesn’t want you to do this.
If you don’t personally check the links on your site (e.g. blog comments), it appears that it’s still a good idea for those links.
PageRank sculpting
Picturesque Google Google, Matt Cutts, page sculpting, PageRank
Microsoft Live is being replaced with Bing. It’s suppose to be an intelligent search. You can limit by category, preview pages, etc.
Microsoft Corporation
Picturesque MSN, News
It’s officially announced (even though anyone watching already knew).
Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
Still, it’s nice to have the official word that Yahoo! is updating things.
Picturesque News, Yahoo!
If you have a site that displays Google AdWords ads, check out the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center. You can contribute to the site letting them know your supported ad formats, sizes and other site data.
Improvements to Google Ad Planner Data
Picturesque Google, News
Illogical government protecting us from stupidity. How many of you have seen a blog or other site touting the benefits of the greatest health cure of all time? Were you foolish enough to believe it? If so, it’s people like you that make certain spammers are inspired to continue spamming us.
The government actually wants to crack down on Internet social marketing media trying to enforce laws similar to print. Here’s the problem folks….where is the author? Can the FTC really stop people blogging in El Salvador? Do they block content they don’t deem worthy? Isn’t this censorship?
Personally let’s get the government out of the business of protecting idiots. If you really believe those wild claims on that blog site, you deserve to lose your cash.
The lesson to the rest of us. Continue to create honest content that guides people to the correct decision for them. It’s less work in the long run and far more fulfilling.
FTC plans regulations for online marketing - vnunet.com
Picturesque News
Search using three or more words and receive more text in your results. Google will show three or four lines of text in search results using an improved search formula. These longer snippets give you a better idea of what you are about to click into and hopefully improve that choppiness that is prevalent in former searches. The improved search is suppose to do a better job at understanding associations and concepts relevant to your search terms.
Official Google Blog: Two new improvements to Google results pages
Picturesque Google, News
There have been a number of reports of Google’s Adwords keyword tool not responding correctly for both API and the external web based tool. Users are reporting a -1 value. Fresh search volume data is being pushed out and this is probably the temporary result of this new data.
Adwords API Keyword Tool lastMonthSearchVolume return -1 randomly - AdWords API Forum | Google Groups
Picturesque Google, News
We are #1 for “SEO Company”. No, this site really isn’t and neither is the person who sent me a messsage saying they were first in Google for SEO Company. I’m still appaled at these bold spam messages that are trying to get you suckered into using their SEO Company services. It’s easy to do a search and determine that they aren’t number one or number anything for any search term. And yet I’ll bet a number of people signed up for their services even though they were using a gmail account.
Picturesque Tips
It’s not Live, it’s Kumo. Microsoft is testing a new search engine code named Kumo. Is it just lipstick on a pig or will this Johnny come lately finally be able to steal some market share?
http://kumo.com/
Picturesque MSN, News
If you are using Google Adwords, check your URLs. Beginning February 24, all URLs much be from the same domain. This decision is intended to avoid abuse of Adwords, but it can also sting those who want to manage multiple domains under one account.
Inside AdWords: A change to our display URL policy
Picturesque Google, News